NOOK Tablet gets unofficial Android Market

Barnes & Noble's NOOK Tablet has been rooted, allowing the 7-inch $249 slate to run the Android Market among other improvements. Although sideloading Android apps has been left straightforward on the NOOK Tablet, the device ships without full Android Market access; Liliputing has pulled together various guides and methods from the clever modders at Xda-developers that help correct that.

Unfortunately, these first-gen hacks aren't quite one-click processes. Instead, they require that the user have the Android Software Developer Kit installed on their computer, along with the Java developer kit, and then enable adb on the NOOK Tablet so as to carry out the actual rooting process and then copy across and modify the Android Market app itself.

Once complete, it hugely increases the number of available apps for the NOOK Tablet, though it's not quite all of them yet; further modification is required to tweak the filtering system, which prevents some compatible apps from being shown in search results. We're also still some ways from an unlocked bootloader, too, which is keeping custom ROMs - which might bypass some of these convoluted processors - at bay. Still, for $249 you perhaps can't really argue.